By Cristina D’Imperio
Nathan Lord, PhD, McGowan affiliated faculty, is the recipient of new funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
The Lord Lab studies the ways in which developing embryos encode instructions for, or signal to, their cells, frequently overcoming genetic mutations and unexpected environmental perturbations. Through these studies, the lab aims to reveal the pathways and principles underlying healthy, robust development.
Dr. Lord’s project, titled “Decoding the Spatial Grammar of Developmental Signaling,” received more than $1.3 million from the NIH to find new methods to create and test developmental signaling patterns and to devise modeling frameworks that can predict developmental outcomes in various patterns of signaling.
Dr. Lord’s strategy involves a new patterning platform that will enable researchers to create signaling patterns in over 5 million cells in a single experiment. Ultimately, this will help to guide the design of error-correcting, synthetic developmental systems and tissues in vitro.
According to Nature, such tissues in vitro can ultimately be used for “fundamental mechanistic studies on development, regeneration and repair in human tissues, and can also be used in diagnostics, disease modelling, drug discovery, and personalized medicine.”
Read the project abstract here.
Visit the Lord Lab here.